Atomic-level fabrication empowering amorphous materials to approach performance limits

Amorphous materials avoid the inherent sensitivity to defects in traditional crystalline materials due to their cross-scale structural uniformity. Therefore, they have irreplaceable and important applications in many advanced technical fields. However, due to their thermodynamically non-equilibrium nature, amorphous materials experience structural relaxation towards equilibrium, leading to performance degradation or even failure during use. Additionally, the complex and disordered structure of amorphous materials results in low-energy excitation, such as boson peaks and tunneling two-level systems, which can cause internal friction and thermal noise in the materials. These factors significantly limit their performance in advanced technical applications. Therefore, effectively improving the stability of amorphous materials and suppressing low-energy excitation are key steps towards breaking through their performance limits. Recent studies have shown that atomic-level fabrication based on enhanced surface dynamics can successfully produce ultrastable amorphous materials, achieving unprecedented control over their microstructure, stability, and low-energy excitation, far exceeding the level achievable by traditional methods. The exceptional advantages of ultrastable amorphous materials endow them with significant application potential in advanced domains such as gravitational wave detection. This article delves into the underlying mechanisms of atomic-level fabrication for amorphous materials, highlighting their structural features and superior performances compared with traditional amorphous materials, and it also outlines future research directions and development trends of atomic-level fabrication in this field.